Birds like the nēnē, ʻiʻiwi and manu-o-Kū are already familiar across the Hawaiian islands — but have you ever heard of the Lānaʻi hookbill?
Only one specimen of the now-extinct honeycreeper remains in a museum collection, and for over a century it has puzzled scientists.
The remnants of the bird’s DNA was thought to be too degraded to salvage, but using new techniques in what’s known as “ancient DNA,” scientists at the Smithsonian have finally cracked the code to the Lānaʻi hookbill.
The discovery can tell us more about how Hawaiʻi’s honeycreepers evolved and can help unlock the full potential of what the collections in these museums .
To learn more, HPR spoke with Smithsonian scientists Rob Fleischer and Michael Campana. Fleischer is the head of the Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute's Center for Conservation Genomics while Campana specializes in analysis of animal and pathogen genomics.
According to Campana, “ancient DNA” defines any DNA sample that has been degraded. It’s a broad definition, as “the samples can range from pretty recent, almost forensic-like stuff … to samples like woolly mammoths,” he said.
Since the only extant Lānaʻi hookbill specimen is housed in the Bishop Museum, it has been subject to tropical temperatures that left it too degraded to study — until now.
“It's infamously one of the … strangest, most specimens known,” Campana told HPR. “Now that DNA technology has progressed so much, we were able to do a whole genome on this one specimen.”
From their study, they were able to find evidence of the Lānaʻi hookbill hybridizing with other bird species on Hawaiʻi and confirm information about the specimen that was previously unknown.
“This was exciting because not only were we able to do a whole genome on this tiny little thing, we were able to confirm that it was a female. We were able to reconstruct its sex chromosomes,” Campana said.
“We're still working on that, to try to fill those gaps in, but it's just unique. It's the remnant of something that was there, and that's not there anymore.”
The discovery is significant because it not only reveals new information about Hawaiʻi’s extinct bird specimens — it also reveals the value of the museum collections they belong to. “They have one of the best collections of Hawaiian birds in the world, and we felt bad not involving them as much as we wanted to,” Fleischer said about the Bishop Museum’s collection.
“These things are not — you can't make them again. Once they're gone, they're gone, and they're super valuable, not just for phylogenetics, but conservation efforts,” Campana said.
“All sorts of different research projects cannot be done without museum specimens.”
More information about the research on the Lānaʻi hookbill can be found here.
This story aired on The Conversation on Aug. 20, 2026. The Conversation airs weekdays at 11 a.m. Jinwook Lee adapted this story for the web.
